September 2021 – Disquiet

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 4, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 30, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0509: The Long Detail
The Assignment: Create a piece of music with moments from a preexisting track.

Step 1: You’re going to be making a piece of music using only a few select details, or brief moments, from an existing piece of music. Choose a source track, preferably one of your own, to begin with.

Step 2: Isolate some details from the track, not so much beats and tones as moments, each of which has a unique quality. Do as many as feels right, based on the source material: perhaps a handful, perhaps a dozen. It’s up to you.

Step 3: Create a piece of music in which each detail/moment is followed by another, for as long as you want. Feel free to repeat them. Put some space between the moments so they exist independently from each other. You might want to edit the moments so they fade in and out, or you made want the edits to feel abrupt. Trust your ear, and your listener’s ear.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0509” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0509” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0509-the-long-detail/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track per weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 4, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 30, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0509” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 509th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Long Detail (The Assignment: Create a piece of music with moments from a preexisting track) — at: https://disquiet.com/0509/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0509-the-long-detail/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is a detail from a painting by Piero della Francesca (1415-1492).

The Patzr Radio podcast, its raw everyday noises coddled and collated, filtered and warped, by Jimmy Kipple, always surprises. What begins here as industrial whine gives way to a shuddering, a rabid flux, that is animal-like, maybe actual animals, such as the quick motion of sea creatures fleeing a net, or simply “-like,” some mechanical device nearing collapse from aeons of use and abuse.

The entries in this ongoing series (episode 237!) are short because they should be listened to on repeat. By the time you get to the end the first time, you understand more about where it began. When it begins anew, you understand the subsequent transitions better (when the whine dies out, when one sound transforms into another). And the more you listen, the more those changes take on compositional quality, the more the piece becomes a composition. Noises become motifs, transitions become development, and alterations become narrative.

And after listening to an episode on repeat, you’ll want to listen back to other episodes and sense how this piece helps unpack previous ones.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/patzr-radio.